Greg Roelofs writes "I've just finished up my hideously detailed report on last Tuesday's "Future of Linux" panel. (You'd think I didn't have a life...) With luck it will help cast some of the other (sometimes misleading) news reports about the evening into perspective. It's at: link (which will resolve to another site, but please use this link). It's even "Don't Fear"-enhanced. :-) "

EETimes has coverage of last week's "Future of Linux" conference. This one recognises that Merced support should be simple (the 64 bit hurdle is long past). What really interests me is that Intel seems to have noticed us: 36 bit physical memory support, MMX support (what does that mean? auto-SIMD in gcc from C code like Metroworks can???), fast system calls (Appendix H stuff?). High profile players like Intel and Oracle and good press from the EDA media like EE-Times may also encourage the EDA vendors to support Linux.

Raymond Fellers writes "Oracle announced that they will release a Linux version of Oracle 8. Article from InfoWorld Electric "

The DjVu Wizard writes "Slashdot ran a story about AT&T Labs' new DjVu document image compression technology a few weeks ago. Versions of the DjVu viewer/plug-in for Netscape are now available for the following platforms: Linux/x86, Irix/SGI, Solaris/Sparc, MacOS8.0. DjVu allows users and web site designers to put high-resolution scanned documents in color on the Web by achieving compression ratios as high as 1000:1. A compressor for various Unix platforms is available free for non-commercial uses. Some Slashdot readers complained about a "spam" clause in our licensing agrement. Our lawyers listened, and removed the clause (it was never our intention to spam anybody anyway). At AT&T Labs, we read Slashdot and we support Linux. "

Good press for Linux is always nice to read, and it was nice to read the CNN article about Linux users and the OS in general.

Jesse Barnes wrote in to let us know where to get at the non-alpha, full version of Linux for many Indys. Additionally, check out the page for more information.

Chomsky writes "This is taken from email correspondence with Brian Paul, the maintainer of Mesa, (the openGL-like library which talks to voodoo glide among other things). I'd love to see support for 3Dnow in Mesa. I don't know Intel assembly so someone would have to contribute the code. In the next version of Mesa I plan to rewrite some of the transformation code to optimize vertex arrays. That would be a good time to add 3Dnow support."

A kindly reader sent in this editorial at ZDNet about why more big corporations aren't adopting Linux. One of the interesting observations is that part of the reasons lie in accountability-if Linux screws up, there is no one to sue. This only reinforces the idea of corporate ideas existing in an entirely different world-we sure would hate to be responsible for ourselves, wouldn't we?

Chris Tyler writes "The long-awaited Informix-on-Linux announcement still has not arrived, but the schedule for the upcoming Informix User Conference includes a session in the Product News track entitled "Informix Goes Linux". The PDF version of the schedule is at here "

joshy writes "Since I got such a good response to my Star/Slinux article, I've decided to start a mailing list to discuss how we could actually build such a system. To subscribe send mail to majordomo@shelbyville.stanford.edu with 'subscribe slinux' in the body of the message. (this is the first time I've set up majordomo so mail me if you have any problems.) "

Gergely Madarasz was right on top of things when he let me know that kernel 2.0.35 has been released. It may be the last kernel in the 2.0.x series. Updates include: documentation updates, parallel port IDE updates, some AX.25 updates, and a lot of other fixes. It weighs in at only a little over 7MB and can be downloaded from any ftp.kernel.org mirror.

Our network of informants let us in on this: Linus was recently interviewed by Boot Magazine, but the interview was only available in the print edition until now. Check out the interview. It's one of the best I've read in a long time. Also, Christopher Blizzard (a truly cool man) wrote in to remind us about the (free) conference between Linus and other prominent figures in the Linux community tomorrow. It will be held in Santa Clara, California, and will be hosted by The Sillicon Valley Linux User's Group.

Florian Cramer writes "Pacific HiTech yesterday announced a PowerPC release of its TurboLinux Distribution. The highlight: It comes with both the Mach-based MkLinux kernel and the monolithic (faster) LinuxPPC kernel. PowerMac owners will be happy to hear that, finally, there's a Linux distribution for their machines which is neither outdated (such as the current official MkLinux CD), nor hard to obtain (such as the LinuxPPC CD). Also, the choice between both Kernels IMHO is an idea that should be adopted by such forthcoming Linux/PPC distributions as Debian. "

Michael sent in a quote from Linus that you all should read. Linus says "Personally, I like KDE better than gnome right now, on the strength of pretty user interface and it working better. I personally use neither, though. I know there has been a lot of silly license flamage, and I don't particularly like it.

My opinion on licenses is that "he who writes the code gets to chose his license, and nobody else gets to complain". Anybody complaining about a copyright license is a whiner.

The anti-KDE people are free to write their own code, but they don't have the moral right to complain about other people writing other code. I despise people who do complain, and I won't be sucked into the argument. But feel free to forward this as you see fit. " Amen. Perhaps I can post stories about KDE or Gnome without rousing a flame war every time?

Jeremy Dinsel wrote in to tell us about SSC updating their Linux Resources site. I think it looks very nice. Sections updated include: the Linux Speakers' Bureau Announcement, the currently empty Linux Employment page, and the Linux Journal 1998 Readers' Choice Announcement. It looks like Slashdot got nominated for best web site! Uh-oh. Did I just accidentally invoke the so-called "Slashdot effect"?

jhpb wrote in to send us a link to the Open Group's jdk. Why do we care? Well, because this version just happens to use Linux Threads. Very cool.

Rob Clark was the first to write us about a Linux article currently running in The Economist. Much of this is familar info to us, but the graph of user satisfication is interesting, and more important to the overall goal of World Domination (tm) this will be running in the print edition as well. Stefane Fermigier wrote as well, mentioning that this article says that Oracle will be ported to Linux. Anyone know anything more?

Matthew Tippett let us in on a very interesting item to disect: Computer Associates is porting Ingres II, their RDBMS program, to Linux. Wow. CA is one of the bigger players in the enterprise market, and perhaps even more interesting, are very close to Microsoft. I hope some IS managers take note! Check out the announcement at DejaNews, or find it on comp.os.linux.announce.

The Debian Project has officially declared Hamm as entering the second beta phase. With around 44 bugs to stomp out, it hopefully won't be too long before the final product is released. Those of you on the true "bleeding edge" can order CDs from Johnie Ingram, or can get info on downloading the images at the Debian CD image site.

Bill McCarthy sent us this InfoWorld story where you can read about Red Hat employee Ryan Tilden going above and beyond the call of duty to support Linux. It's amazingly positive publicity, and its on InfoWorld. Very cool.